


Shelter from the Storm

by weakinteraction



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-17
Updated: 2015-10-17
Packaged: 2018-04-26 20:42:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5019757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dax and Kira revisit the ruins of the Founders' homeworld after "The Die is Cast".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shelter from the Storm

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silly_cleo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silly_cleo/gifts).



The wind howled across the high plateau. In the distance another scouring duststorm swirled across the plains, growing larger and getting closer with every passing second.

"Are you sure this is it?" Kira shouted over the gale. "It doesn't look anything like where we beamed in."

Dax tilted her tricorder so that Kira could see the map on the display, the blinking beamout beacon coinciding perfectly with their location indicator. They stepped into the lee of a small wall of rocks that had been a cliff face when they arrived. "The storms must have stripped away all those boulders we saw when we arrived."

"All this is the effect of the bombardment?" Dax didn't need to be able to see Kira's eyes to imagine the look of horror, at the scale of the atrocity the Cardassians could have visited upon Bajor if they had chosen to.

"One of the effects. The only reason there's any land here is that this was the side of the planet opposite the fleet. On the other side, most of the crust is just ... gone. There's all sorts of secondary seismic activity rippling through the whole planet."

"Well, if there was ever anything worth finding, it doesn't look like it's still here," Kira said. They had beamed to these co-ordinates because from the _Defiant_ Dax had detected electromagnetic emissions that might be technological in origin. But down here on the surface there was nothing; either their source had been stripped into tiny fragments by a passing storm, or the signal had never been anything more than echoes in the ionosphere.

"Agreed." The whole mission felt like a colossal waste of time, but Starfleet Intelligence had insisted that any useful information that could be extracted from the Omarion Nebula had to be -- and since the _Defiant_ was the only Starfleet ship with a cloaking device, it had to be them that did it. Dax tapped her combadge. "Dax to _Defiant_. Two to beam up." There was no response. She tried again. "Dax to _Defiant_. Come in."

She turned to Kira, who rolled her eyes before tapping her own communicator. "Kira to _Defiant_." Still nothing but a stubborn buzz of static. "Kira to anyone!" After a moment of silence, she asked Dax, "Could the storm be causing some sort of interference?"

Dax took a quick set of readings with her tricorder. "Silicate particulate density in the atmosphere is increasing. But nothing the _Defiant_ shouldn't be able to cut through."

"Could something have happened to them?"

"You think they encountered a Jem'Hadar patrol?"

"Hey," Kira said, putting her hands up, "I didn't say that."

"No, you made me say it.".

"O'Brien does keep insisting on telling me that the cloaking device isn't 'actually magic, Major'."

Dax considered. "They might have had to go into a non-synchronous orbit to evade, or even headed out of orbit for a while. They'll be back for us when it's safe," she said with a confidence she didn't entirely feel.

"Safe for them, maybe. What about safe for us?" Kira looked over Dax's shoulder at the approaching storm. It seemed to fill the sky from one side to another.

Dax consulted her tricorder. "We should find shelter. There seems to be an opening in the cliff... twenty-eight meters that way." She pointed. The tiny fissure in the rock looked like it could easily have been a trick of the shadow. "If we can get a few meters inside, we should be safe from the erosion the storm will cause."

"Come on, then," Kira said.

They ducked low and ran at a crouch across the plateau. The wind was deafening all around them, smaller particles already whipping around inside its vortices.

And then suddenly, as they were closing the final meters to the fissure, the storm was on them, much sooner than it should have been. The whole world became nothing but a swirling maelstrom of dust. Directions became impossible to distinguish. There was only the storm, everywhere and always.

They both got down to their knees instinctively. Dax grabbed Kira's elbow with one hand and with the other brought her tricorder right up to her face, the only way she could see its display clearly. "Come on!" she yelled.

Whirling grains of dust sliced into every exposed surface of Dax's skin like razor blades. And this was only the outer edge of the storm; the wind speeds in the centre would be an order of magnitude higher. They had to get to safety, fast. Dax tugged Nerys in the right direction, but as they neared the cliff face she stumbled, hitting her head against the rock.

The whirling storm around them filled Dax's awareness. And then there was nothing.

* * *

Dax recovered before Jadzia. The symbiont's awareness stretched only to the sensations of being nestled in the warmth of the host's abdomen. Normally the feeling of being surrounded by internal organs and blood vessels mingled with the host's own sensations of having the symbiont inside them, part of the communion of mind and body that made a joined Trill what they were.

This environment was warm, though, not unlike the ancestral cave-pools of the homeworld, and pulsing gently - Jadzia was still alive. Dax hated these moments; they were uncomfortably close to the jangling terror of sudden host-death, trapped inside their cooling, stiffening corpse with no way of knowing if or when rescue was coming. It was so much better when a new Joining was planned well in advance.

It really didn't pay to be alone with your own thoughts for too long in situations like this. Dax reached out along the synaptic pathways joining their minds and stirred Jadzia to wakefulness.

Jadzia's eyes flickered open and were immediately dazzled by the blue-ish light of a dermal regenerator. She winced involuntarily at the sudden brightness.

"Hold still," Kira said. She was studying the display of the medical tricorder, her face lit by the green glow of its screen. One whole side of her face was crossed by thin scars, tiny cuts made by the sand grains and already healing. The shoulder of her uniform was torn to fine ribbons. Jadzia could feel cold air against the skin above her hip and knew that the same thing must have happened to her.

"You look terrible," Jadzia said weakly.

"You should see yourself," Kira said. "Or at least, the way you looked until I figured out how to persuade this thing that I did have Basic Field Medic training." She moved the regenerator down to Dax's neck; its field tickled her collar bone.

"Do you?" Dax asked. "Have Basic Field Medic training?"

"I persuaded this piece of junk to accept my equivalent practical experience from years in the underground."

Kira moved the regenerator down to Dax's belly, and folded back the flap of uniform covering her lacerated skin. Dax winced as the regenerator got to work; the cuts here were deeper. "Was I out for long?"

"About ten minutes."

"Still nothing from the _Defiant_?"

"I don't think any comms are getting through at the moment. We'll have to wait for the storm to pass."

Dax managed to move her head a little to see around them. They were deep inside the rock face, at a point where the fissure Kira must have dragged her through opened up into a small cavern with a low roof. There was a dull, distant roar, the howling wind of the storm.

"I said hold still," Kira hissed as the beam from the dermal regenerator slipped over onto the rock wall before sparkling into nothingness when it realised there wasn't any flesh there to try to regenerate.

"You have a terrible bedside manner."

"I'm thinking of applying for a job with Starfleet Medical," Kira said as she restarted the device. "Think I've got a shot? I've already got Field Medic status, after all."

"I think the odds of you joining Starfleet Medical are about the same as the odds of you joining Starfleet at all: mathematically indistinguishable from zero. The only shot here is the cheap one you're taking at Julian."

"There," Kira said. "Finished." She replaced the regenerator in the slot at the top of the medical tricorder. "Could have done with one of these back in the day," she said as she put it away. She ran her fingers up the exposed skin on Jadzia's side. "Good as new." Her hand lingered near Jadzia's hip, and then suddenly she was leaning down and Jadzia felt Kira pressing her lips against hers, her hand snaking back up again to slide inside her bra.

It had been over a year since they'd last been intimate like this. Kira had wanted to be monogamous with Bareil, and Jadzia had of course respected that; after his awful death, Jadzia had been letting her grieve at her own pace.

"Nerys..." Jadzia managed to say when they broke for breath.

"Don't," Nerys said in reply. "Don't ask me if I'm sure, if I'm really ready, or whatever it was you were going to say."

"Am I allowed to say that I've missed this?"

Nerys smiled, and Jadzia pretended not to see the glistening of her eyes. Then they kissed again.

Jadzia put her hand to Nerys's side. In the position they were in she couldn't quite manage to bring it up to mirror what Nerys was doing to her, so she settled for sliding it down to her hip. In response, Nerys pressed into her and lightly pinched her nipple, before grabbing Jadzia's hand with her free one and sliding it round to her crotch.

The sudden urgency took Jadzia aback for a moment but it was undeniably one hell of a turn on. The part of her that enjoyed having a partner who took control -- she liked to think of it as a legacy of Emony, studiously ignoring the unjoined Jadzia's own predelictions in that direction -- had always appreciated Kira's approach to lovemaking. Needing no further encouragement, Jadzia fumbled her way past the belt of Kira's uniform and began to rub her clit. Kira gasped as Jadzia's fingers tried to slide further down, but the angles weren't working. She resumed stroking Kira's clit and Kira used her free hand to begin doing the same to her through her uniform.

The whole situation was too much for Jadzia and she quickly found herself coming; she leaned up into Nerys's kiss as she redoubled her own efforts, and was soon rewarded by Kira gasping through her own orgasm.

"Still think I have a terrible bedside manner?" Kira said as they broke apart.

"I think there's a difference between bed _side_ and in--" Jadzia was interrupted by a low rumbling shaking the cavern. She clung tighter to Kira to steady herself. "I don't want to sound like a cliché, but did you just feel the earth move?"

Kira's eyes widened. "Secondary seismic activity, you said."

Jadzia's eyes flicked around the cavern again. Now, instead of shelter from the dust storm, she saw possible fracture points, passages that could be cut off, trapping them inside. "This whole rock formation could collapse any moment."

Kira flipped open the tricorder with one hand even as she adjusted her uniform with the other. "As best we can read from in here, the storm's nearly passed. Are you going to be all right to move?"

"You weren't so worried about my ability to handle physical activity a few moments ago," Jadzia said with a smirk as she levered herself up from the floor.

"Mind your head," said Kira, using her hand to stop Jadzia from standing up fully. "It's a very low roof."

They made their way at a crouch towards the entrance, and Jadzia was filled with renewed appreciation for the feat Kira had pulled off in dragging her through .

" _Defiant_ to away team," came a crackly voice on their communicators as they reached the entrance.

Jadzia rested against Kira as she responded. "Away team here. It's very good to hear your voice, Commander."

"Apologies for the delay," Ben said with his usual sense of understatement. "We've been playing hide-and-seek in the outer reaches of the nebula with the Jem'Hadar."

"It was always a risk that the Dominion would return to their trap to see if anyone else had taken the bait," Jadzia said.

"They've left the system now," Ben said. "We'll decloak just long enough to beam you up, then head back to the Alpha Quadrant."

"The sooner the better," Kira said.

They helped each other out onto the plateau. The storm had passed, leaving scintillating dust scattering the nebula light, like a sunset that stretched across the entire sky.

"It's beautiful," Kira said. "How can it be beautiful?"

Before Jadzia could respond, the sparkling of the sky was replaced by the sparkling of the transporter beam, and they were gone.


End file.
